Justin Trudeau has a profound respect for Canada’s charter of rights, not surprisingly given his father’s role in introducing it. Too bad he doesn’t seem to understand it.

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Hamilton, Ont., the prime minister dismissed what he referred to as the “kerfuffle around the Canada Summer Jobs program.”

The Liberals, in their determination to force their abortion views on those who may disagree, say organizations applying for grants to hire summer students must attest that their core mandate is in line with the government’s position on “reproductive rights.” They have to check off a box confirming their acquiescence, and can’t submit the application unless they do. In other words, any organization that has qualms about Canada’s lack of an abortion law, or the Trudeau government’s whole-hearted support for unfettered abortion at any stage of the birth process, need not apply.

There has been considerable consternation about this. Although polls suggest most Canadians support the right to an abortion in general, it is hardly unanimous, and many people, given the chance, would certainly agree that some rules — say, on late-term abortions, or sex-selection procedures that allowed girls to be terminated for the sin of being girls — would not be out of place.

Trudeau is unmoved, and unwilling to accept that fellow Canadians who hold views different from his own shouldn’t be treated as lesser beings, ineligible for public funds to which they contribute, and to which all other Canadian organizations are welcome to apply.

“An organization that has the explicit purpose of restricting women’s rights by removing rights to abortion and the right for women to control their own bodies is not in line with where we are as a government, and quite frankly where we are as a society,” said Trudeau.

Patty Hajdu stands in the House of Commons during question period, in Ottawa on Friday, December 9, 2016. Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press file photo

“In terms of church groups that are concerned that this may invalidate them from funding, in fact, my perspective is that it won’t, as long as their core mandate agrees with those hard-won rights and freedoms that Canadians expect us to stand up for,” she said.

Neither Trudeau or Hajdu appear to understand that there is no wording in the Charter that offers a constitutional right to abortion. Nor is there anything in the law, since there is no abortion law in Canada. The Supreme Court’s 1988 ruling on abortion threw out the legislation that existed at the time, but left a vacuum in its wake, which no government has had the nerve to fill. Suggesting Canada has “hard won rights and freedoms” that protect the right to terminate unborn children is simply not true. What it has is a total lack of rules, and a public unwilling to confront the commotion that would surely arise from any effort to re-open the matter.

This allows people like Trudeau to pretend that Canada has undergone a fierce debate over the issue, and “pro-choice” emerged victorious. He seized on this falsehood in his remarks in Hamilton, in which he used the term “rights” three times to describe a situation in which no rights have been codified. Simply because pro-abortion organizations habitually refer to “a woman’s right to choose” doesn’t mean it exists; women in Canada have the ability to choose — simply because there is nothing to stop them — but that’s not the same as a right. In fact, the 1988 decision indicated that the mother’s rights should be balanced against the child’s. People and organizations can oppose abortion and still be respectable, law-abiding citizens. It’s not clear whether the Prime Minister understands this distinction, or prefers to ignore it in favour of a less honest approach.

What Trudeau’s government is doing is to treat Liberal policy and pro-choice dogma as equivalent to Charter protection. It reflects the innate Liberal conceit that party policy inherently reflects national opinion, that if Liberals believe something, it must be right and true.

The effect of Trudeau’s position is to take federal funding and tie it to forced acceptance of Liberal beliefs. All governments use their access to the public purse to advance their own interests to some degree — Stephen Harper’s Conservatives littered the country with signs hailing their Economic Action Plan — but none that I know of have specifically contained an ideological purity test requiring applicants to profess their explicit support of government policy before they are even allowed to apply. In this case, party policy was earlier rewritten to reflect the personal opinion of the leader, so that Liberals who hope to sit and vote with the party must support the abortion views of Justin Trudeau.

The Charter protects lots of things, one of which is the right to disagree with government policy without the fear of being punished for it. But Trudeau is doing just that. Canadian organizations that have legitimate concerns about the total lack of any rules on abortion are being openly discriminated against. Only by pretending to agree with Trudeau’s position can they get equal treatment. They must lie to be treated equally.

To treat this matter as no more than a “kerfuffle” is the sort of flippancy we get altogether too often from this prime minister. The numerous setbacks the Liberals suffered last year raised questions about Trudeau’s judgement. He misjudged public reaction to his finance minister’s tax reform plan, he failed to appreciate the indignation small business owners would feel at being labelled tax-evading ingrates, he didn’t grasp the ethical questions surrounding his acceptance of a freebie vacation from a billionaire who does business with his government. In shrugging off the deeply held views of Canadians with doubts about open-ended abortion, he’s starting out 2018 with more of the same.